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Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Yaroslav Bulatov, who runs one of the new machine learning blogs, points us to CiteULike, a very intriguing site. Some of you may have used web-based bookmark sites like Furl or del.icio.us, and may have even used the "social bookmarking" aspect of these sites.

CiteULike is a similar site, for archiving papers. Here's how it works. If you find a paper you are interested in, you click on a bookmark link, and the paper is added to a web-based collection under your name. However, what makes this unique is that if the paper link is on a "well known" site like the ACM DL, Citeseer, arxiv, or many other places, bibliographic information is automatically added to the entry (this is because the server parses pages etc and extracts the necessary bibliographic information)

Subsequently, when you want to extract bib entries for all these papers, one click gets you a .bib file for all the papers you want. This is very handy (for example) when you are doing a literature search and reading/downloading papers by the dozen.

You can also associate tags with the entries if you choose to. This gets into the "social bookmarking" aspect of CiteULike: the idea being that if you tag a bunch of papers as being related to "artgallery", and so does someone else, you will learn what the other person has found and vice versa. Personally, I am either too oldfashioned or too clueless to have made effective use of this feature, but the archiving/.bib features above are enough for me try it out.

Like any respectable web-based service, there are RSS feeds for any view of the collection (by tag, by person, by personal tag), and there are also watch lists, so if you want to keep track of when a new page (tag or person) adds a new paper, you can do so.